Soumkine x Minimal.Plan planner review

June 6, 2018

I’ve been working on a super exciting project these past few weeks, and started to share some pieces of it on Instagram…It’s now time for the big reveal!I’ve partnered with Soumkine, a stationery brand based in Paris, to design a gorgeous 6 months freedated planner in limited edition.

Before I start to tell you more about this collaboration and the gorgeous planner we’ve been working on, I’d like to thank you all: nothing would have been possible without you and this amazingly supportive planner community. So from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU <3

About Soumkine

Soumkine is a stationery brand based in Paris (and so am I so that was good start!). They are creating and crafting gorgeous handmade notebooks with high quality papers. Every single notebook is made by hand in their Parisian workshop.

I already had an history with this brand before we started to work together: I fell in love with their products back in september and was using their one task per day planner as my gratitude journal.

So when Fiodor, founder of Soumkine (and true paper lover), first reached out to offer me the chance to work together on a collaboration, I was (of course) overhelmed with excitement but also a bit worried about the result… I stayed true to my minimalist style and the planner we designed together is honestly way above my initial expectations!

Minimal.Plan x Soumkine freedated planner overview

What we came up with is actually much more than a planner: it’s a tool that helps you plan your goals and incorporate them in your daily plans to make sure you reach them. The planners features both planning layouts (monthly and weekly) and notes pages to hold all your thoughts and projects in one place. Its size (19x25cm) offers a wide writing and sketching space and is perfect for the (long) list lovers.

The Soumkine team created amazing minimal planning layouts and I couldn’t resist to add some planning tips to help you find your way through this amazing paper good.

Besides its planning and note pages, the Soumkine x Minimal.Plan planner features resources to help you achieve your goals: you’ll find explanations on the layouts to use them effectively, and 4 whole pages of planning tips to guide you through your goal setting and planning journey including advice on how to define your goals, how to make a plan to reach them and tricks to help you stay on tracks along the way.

That being said, let’s give you a full review of what’s inside this paper wonder.

Features in details

Cover and first pages

I’m a true functionalist spirit: I’ll always choose function over form. But I’m also convinced that having beautiful supplies really helps to keep using them. And that’s especially true about planners that ask to be filled daily.So we’ve make everything to make the Minimal.Plan x Soumkine planner a planner that you’ll love for both its look and function.

It starts with the cover. I decided on navy blue because it’s rich, classical yet bright. It gives the notebook a classy & professional look that is perfect if you want to use it at work.

The very first page of the planner is a tracing paper sheet with an inspirational quote on it to give you some motivation to get to work. It’s just a taste of the inspiration you’ll find in the planner to reach your goals!The next page features a “If found” form.

Just after the first pages with inspirational quote and if found section, we’ve added 2 pages with a pre-built index to help you keep track of the content.

Planning and notes pages

The Soumkine x Minimal.Plan is a free dated planner. This means that you can start it whenever you want, take a break from it at some point and start over later… It’s a very adaptable organization tool that offers a lot of freedom.

Monthly layout

Right after the index pages, we created 12 monthly pages. The monthly plans spreads are designed to help you manage your schedule (events and appointments) and your projects: the “to-do” section can hold your monthly task list and the boxed calendar is perfect to plan deadlines and workload on your projects.

The Soumkine x Minimal.Plan planner is a 6 months planner but we decided to include 12 monthly pages to allow easy future planning.

Weekly plans

The vertical weekly layout is where the magic happens on a daily basis.

It features (obviously) 7 columns for the 7 day of the week, a to do section and a ladder on the left for edge indexing.

The columns offer a space to write the date and are divided in two boxes. This set-up allows endless variations. You can use the two sections to:

separate your personal and work tasks

have a full section dedicated to events and appointments

have a task list for each day and make a master plan for the week using arrows

create a gratitude or food log under your task list

…or whatever you’ll imagine to answer your needs!

Note pages

After each weekly page, we’ve put a double spread for notes. You can use it for your meeting notes, brainstorm and all the lists that doesn’t fit the planning pages. With 54 additional note pages, there’s plenty of room to hold everything you need to keep on hand.

Planning tips

A planner is a great tool to plan goals and make your dreams come true. But it’s not always easy to know where to start and how to work on big goals on a daily basis.

To help you with this matter, I added some tips in the planner.

My first goal with these tips is to give you some basic information on how to use the planner: how to index content, use the monthly layout effectively, and what to do with note pages are some of the questions I answer with these tips.You’ll find these tips as you’ll flip through the notebook and I hope they’ll be helpful for those of you who aren’t familiar with undated planners.

Besides these basic guidelines, I’ve also worked on 4 full pages of planning tips, enriched with advanced tricks. My goal here is to help you with the whole process of achieving your goals: how to set them, break them down into action plans and how to make sure you work on them on a daily basis. I promised I tried to make things simple and a bit fun! Everything is detailed step by step, with examples of how to use the planner spreads to make your dreams happen. Sky’s the limit!

I’m obviously not objective at all about this planner, but let me say that I LOVE it. We’ve worked hard to make this happen and I’m very proud of the gorgeous freedated planner we came up with.

Hi Mark! Sorry for the super late answer, I confess I was enjoying my vacations a bit… The paper of the planner is definitely fountain pen friendly. Soumkine posted about it on their Instagram account right here : https://www.instagram.com/p/BjzmiI_FZOt/?taken-by=soumkine In case you’d like to have a closer look at how it handles fountain pen 😉

Very clean and interesting concept. Help pages are always a welcome addition. The fact that pages are already laid out takes one decision easier and achievable straight away – the monthly calendar – but still leaves room for personalization.